Content note: brief mention of past domestic violence.
"Fun fact. Ready?” Pauline leans forward and the elbows in her worn Carhartt jacket stretch tight.
My leg’s bouncing. We’ve been getting on, me and Pauline, so I say of course I’m ready. Shoot.
“More bees than men have gone to outer space.” She watches my face.
“Is that true?” I say, figuring she wouldn’t bring it up if it wasn’t, but wanting to stretch it out for her sake.
She laughs. “Don’t sound true, does it? But it is. I mean, almost thirty-five hundred of them. Can you imagine?”
“Wow,” I say, laughing harder than is warranted. “No way.”
“Way,” Pauline says.
I’m sitting across from her in a trailer-turned-office that says FRONTIER HONEY FARM & APIARY above the front entrance. Pauline’s office door and nameplate on her desk both have a plaque with QUEEN BEE stamped into it. Their mascot’s everywhere you look, a little cartoon bee with a tiny cowboy hat and squiggles behind him to show his speed. The office, it’s cold due to the late firm-gripping winter and the windows in those things aren’t usually very good unless you go out of your way to make them that way.
Somehow Pauline’s told me all about herself by the time we settle ourselves on either side of her too-wide desk covered in cracks and coffee mugs and all sorts of folders and different-coloured forms. Pauline told me my application stood out because I’m Canadian and she’s half-Canuck herself. Her granddad landed in Nova Scotia and they scooted over to British Columbia so he could take a job with Pacific Meat and then bought land in Washington where her dad and mom ran a dairy operation with their seven kids including Pauline and that’s where they learned how to work and how to work hard and she surprised everyone by marrying a beekeeper from rural Halifax who happened to share her grandad’s surname although there was no direct relation, she assured me. “So it was half-betrayal, on account of getting out of dairy, and half-return for becoming a MacNeil again.” Some small family farm wasn’t the goal: they wanted to spread East, spread West, get their bees everywhere, help be part of the solution. They’re still in the branching out stage and she wants me to be a part of it. If I do a good job this season, well, she has no reason not to bring me on again.
“I don’t know how people do it,” she says. “Not work with animals, I mean. Stare at a computer all day. Have you seen all the apps now? All the messed up ways kids can sell their bodies? Freaks me right out, I mean.”
“Me, too,” I say. “Plus I’ve always liked bees. Bugs of all kinds.”
“Your resume’s eclectic,” she says. “For some folks who’re hiring, makes you look bad. I like it. Shows you’re curious, I mean.”
Pauline’s got pillowy bags underneath her eyes like Mom does, like small smooth tumours, and her red joints bunch and pop and that’s familiar, too, and a comfort in a way: I know those eyes, I know those hands.
“Now, Marnie, Gavin must be out there already, so why don’t we get our butts into gear?”
“Zinnia.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s just that my name’s Zinnia, not Marnie. But it’s all right.”
She peers at me, as if seeing me for the first time or the second in better lighting. “You don’t say. Look just like a Marnie that used to work here and — well, I’m sure you don’t give a rat’s ass about Marnie Miller. Let’s meet Gavin.”
⬡
You are pressing against the walls surrounding you with the urge of — forward forward — and your feelers detect the scent of others and the brief weight as they venture close and they spray you with smell — !come!come! — and you shift and move and push and pull and — !come!come! — you tug and the smells arrive fast and ferocious and confusing and it is wonderful and each of your feet bounces when you touch the world — so many vibrations — and you emerge from your cocoon with messages striking from every angle — others like you flit and scurry and shift and greet — !welcome!welcome! — and it is clear you belong and you are wanted but it is dark and the scents are daunting in their abundance.
Welcome, sister, they waft. Welcome, kin.
One approaches you and she is — !new! — like you and she has soft vibrations — h e l l o — that sound muted and colourless but enticing and she touches her right feeler to you and you reach forward with your right feeler and you know each other.
Someone is coming and it is Mother and she smells — !SAFE! — and as she arrives the scents are distilled and organized and she moves towards you and as she comes and you breathe in — !SAFE!SAFE! — you are calm and soothed and balmed — !ease!ease! — and the first thing you know is that you are new and empty with hunger and you are craving sweet and you know precisely what to do. The scents align and organize and categorize and the vibrations — you notice now — are code, are story — and the smells are — everything.
— B.A. Dale (she/her) is a PhD candidate at the University of New Brunswick. Her fiction has been published with Prairie Fire and subTerrain, among others. She was longlisted for the 2024 CBC Short Story Prize and won the 2018 Okanagan Short Story Contest. She lives on unceded Syilx territory (Kelowna, BC).
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